French Decolonization

            The French Empire was at one time second only to that of the British.  Under Napoleon, in fact, there were moments when Great Britain’s world power status was severely tested.  Having risen up through feudalism to nationhood faster, France held a view of its cultural superiority that was echoed even by its competing neighbors.  For a time it was thought fashionable for foreign nobility and royalty to converse in French.  Napoleon had been the darling of European advocates of the Enlightenment until he revealed his intentions to bring all of Europe under French domination.  The modern French nation, however, had to deal with the humiliation of having collapsed under Nazi aggression in only six weeks.  Furthermore, being conquered was made worse by France’s legacy of collaboration with its conqueror even to the point of French policemen’s outstripping the Nazis in the pursuit of Jews.  Still the Free French under Charles de Gaulle had fought on against Hitler from North Africa.  After the war, a French senator was quoted as saying, “. . . with its Empire, France was a great power, but without it, France would only be a small bit of the European continent.”  The desire to regain French prestige, therefore, led France after World War II to go to great lengths to hang on to two of its most important colonies, Algeria (and other holdings in Africa) and French Indochina.  Neither attempt was successful.  Thus, the birthplace of the Enlightenment and the site of Napoleon’s meteoric rise retained, to quote a recent author, only a fragile glory.
Having colonies did not make one’s nation popular after the 20th-century world wars.  Nationalism of formerly oppressed peoples was more in vogue.  The United States lost its colony of the Philippines to the Japanese during World War II, and then fought hard to regain it only to give it to the Filipino people in 1946.  You have seen how Great Britain was retreating from the extent to which it held far-flung gems like India.  All the Axis powers had been stripped of their colonies as part of the peace.  France, indeed, backed away from its commitments in the Middle East in both Syria and Lebanon.  Then it stood against the better judgment of many of its allies and many of its own citizens and fought two bitter wars against nationalist forces first in French Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) and then in Algeria.  Internal strife over these conflicts nearly touched off a civil war in France itself.  The United States found itself in the awkward position of funding the exploits of France in Southeast Asia to retain France’s cooperation against the Soviets in Europe.  Great political and social movements were launched both in France and in its collapsing empire by these bitter struggles.
France had ruled Indochina for around a century when the Japanese added Southeast Asia to its Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere during World War II.  Perhaps the French should have learned from the stiff resistance against Japanese occupation that the Vietnamese, especially, were ready to assert their nationalism.  Ho Chi Minh, the charismatic young leader of the Communist Party of Vietnam, had learned Marxism while studying in France and Russia around the time of World War I.  Since his call for self-determination after the Great War went unheeded, Ho strove to expand his appeal between the wars despite French repression.  When the Japanese weakened the French hold on Indochina beginning in 1941, Ho’s communists redoubled their efforts for national liberation.  His movement, known as the Viet Minh, operated out of bases in south China and carved out territory along the Red River delta in what would become North Vietnam.  In the transition between Japanese departure and the French return, the communists garnered support with the peasants by community relief and building efforts, especially during a famine that struck between 1944 and 1945.  Using guerrilla tactics modeled after those of Mao in China, Ho Chi Minh consolidated his control until by August of 1945 he held Hanoi and declared the establishment of an independent nation of Vietnam.
South Vietnam did not possess any unifying leader like Ho to channel the nationalistic impulses of competing parties.  The French returned to power in Saigon by March of 1946.  For the next eight years, the North Vietnamese continued their guerrilla tactics they had employed against the Japanese but now against the French.  By 1954 the communist nationalists controlled most of the countryside while the French held on to more and more fortified towns with increasing amounts of American support.  The climax came that year at a fortress near the Laotian border called Dien Bien Phu.  The French had chosen this village in the highlands of North Vietnam because it was surrounded by mountains they thought would shield them from Ho Chi Minh’s artillery.  Film footage later revealed the tremendous resolve of the communist guerrilla fighters in disassembling their large guns in order to move them up torturous mountain paths.  Vietnamese women placed the smaller pieces and artillery ammunition atop bicycles and walked alongside them.  Hundreds of communist nationalists pulled the barrels up sheer cliffs with ropes.
When these guns were reassembled on top of the mountains shielding Dien Bien Phu, the French position became desperate.  While the French first tried to resupply their roughly 10,000 troops by air, they eventually saw their doom and tried merely to evacuate, all under the incessant shelling from above.  The French actually appealed to the United States at that point and requested Dwight Eisenhower to drop an atomic bomb on Dien Bien Phu in order to neutralize the entire North Vietnamese Army (and the remaining French).  Eisenhower declined, and Dien Bien Phu fell.  At a conference in Geneva in 1954, the victory won recognition of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam with a promise that in two years elections would be held to unite North and South Vietnam as one, independent country.  These facts now shift to become the background for the Vietnam War, the longest military conflict in US history.
Now it was the turn of the Algerians.  Colonized in the early 19th century, Algeria was the oldest and one remaining jewel in the French imperial crown.  The location of Algeria, right across the Mediterranean, and the fact that one million ethnically French citizens lived in the colony made France willing to go to almost any length to keep it.  Foreshadowing America’s coming Vietnam nightmare, elements of French society lambasted the French army for reports of torture and brutality while those not wanting to just let Algeria go charged those critics with treason.  The struggle in French society as the conflict in Africa escalated brought Charles de Gaulle back to power by 1958.  The old Free French general promptly dismantled the French constitution and gained 80% of the vote in a national referendum on his new one.  The Algerian War allowed de Gaulle to assume almost monarchical executive power for a seven year term.  This sudden shift and the launch of a popular hero to power became known as Gaullism, a not-so-subtle reference to Bonapartism.
Some of the staunchest supporters of Algerian nationalism were the African soldiers who had fought with the French army in Europe and the Middle East in World War II and even in Indochina.  Watching France defeated in Vietnam made them think hard about their position in the French Empire when they returned home to renewed racial discrimination.  Economic restrictions reminiscent of the old forced labor and confiscation of crops from France’s early administration of Algeria made a ready supply of disgruntled workers in Algerian towns.  What followed was a brutal Algerian civil war after de Gaulle took power in France.  The Secret Army Organization (OAS) formed in 1960 and committed atrocities against Arabs and Berbers supporting the independence movement as well as against French settlers who thought Algeria should be free.  When these efforts merely prolonged the strife generated by France’s deep desire to keep Algeria, de Gaulle began to think the situation was hopeless.  The French had already exhausted what support Britain and the United States would offer with the Indochina War.  While seeking a peaceful resolution like those achieved with other French colonies farther to the south in Africa, de Gaulle was nearly assassinated by the OAS.  Algeria won its independence by 1962.
As the French army withdrew, Algeria nearly descended into chaos.  What had been a multiracial society under France seemed impossible to sustain as a result of the bitterness of the fighting across and within ethnicities.  The Arabs and the Berbers, who were both largely Muslim groups and had shared neighborhoods set apart from Europeans in Algerian cities, found their racial differences a new source of tension under independence.  Over 900,000 French left Algeria in the wake of independence creating social tensions back in Europe where they were seeking relocation in a shrinking French economy.  Tens of thousands of both Arabs and Berbers who had sided with the French in the long war also fled to France creating the substantial Algerian population now present there.
As more and more of the tactics of the French army during the war came to light the divisions in France during World War II came to the fore again as one observer asked, “Was there a Gestapo in Algeria?”  Other French thinkers said the whole colonial experience had been based on mere violence from conquest to exploitation to pacification.  The French people were left with the loss of tens of thousands of soldiers and a more powerful president free to operate on his own in foreign affairs.  Most of the French people tried to forget about the war in Algeria and to focus on positioning France for a critical role in a coming European Union where France could tout its leadership in caring for the human rights of the minorities integrated into its society.  Unfortunately for Algeria, their winning of independence did not mean that they were through with civil war.